“The Council sucks,” I said for a lack of anything better to say about them or the situation. I didn’t know them, but assumed that they were probably the people who spent the most time at the wedding and other functions ridiculing me.
“I agree,” Dad said, “but that’s how our pack is run. In some ways, I agree that having so many people vote on something is better than having one person make all of the rules, but those same people have been on the Council for nearly a hundred years now, and they aren’t going to change tradition in any way. I also agree that it would have been dangerous for you to stay there. Not only that, but the Regent—that’s the ruling Council over all the supernatural races—has made it illegal to tell humans except under dire circumstances about the supernatural world.”
“Wouldn’t they have considered me a dire circumstance?” I asked.
“No. You were an infant. They would have most likely told us to send you to an orphanage or something and to be done with you, but we couldn’t. We loved you too much.”
In that moment, I was glad my parents loved me as much as they do, but I wondered at how distant they were to me over the years and thought, fleetingly, that I might have been better off at an orphanage.
The look my mother gave me said that my thoughts were written all over my face and that she was hurt by them and sorry she hadn’t been a better mother. I flew off the loveseat, rushed to my mother, threw my arms around her waist, and buried my face in her lap. All the while, I cried and told her I was sorry for thinking badly of her and my father and for not understanding why they were the way they were.
She cried and told me she loved me. Had always loved me, but her fear that the Council would come and take me away or make them give me up made her keep her distance.
“Of course, now we understand that we would have never allowed that,” my father said, patting my back. They would have fought the Council to keep me, found a way to leave the pack, and moved us away. No shifter likes to be without a pack—they are stronger in every way when they belong to a pack—but to keep me, if no other pack would have me, they would have done so. Over time, all of them would have lost the ability to shift, lost their senses, and in most ways become human. Their blood heirs would be more or less human. That would have broken my heart if I had ever found out.
After my mother and I had our cry, she lifted me from her lap, wiped my face, and said, “We have something for you.”
“What is it?” I asked, looking from my parents to Ryan questioningly. Ryan shook his head in confusion.
“It’s a letter from your great aunt. She sent it to us shortly before she died,” Mom said, as my father went to the hall closet to get said letter.
I moved back to sit beside Ryan, bracing myself for what I was about to read. With trembling hands, I took the offered letter. The manila envelope he handed me was large and thick. The site of the name on the return address label shocked me and I all but tore open the letter.
Mrs. Weston had been my great aunt. All of this time, she had been my family. In the letter, I read all about how she had been the one to pay for my college in order to bring me closer to her. How she purposely found me at the bookstore and used writing her memoirs as an excuse to help me out financially while I found my way in the world. She also explained that her family wouldn’t know anything about me until after she was dead, and she had a feeling that a few of her children and grandchildren wouldn’t be happy finding out that she had left some of her money to me, explaining her daughter’s attitude toward me.
All of the stories Mrs. Weston had shared with me over the years about her family flooded me, and I understood that she was telling me about her family, even my mother, though she had known little about her. The memories and the grief over losing Mrs. Weston brought on a new wave of tears. Ryan pulled me close and passed the letter on to my parents.
After a while, my mother stood, approached the sofa, and said, “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up. You can’t keep crying hysterically like this. It isn’t good for the baby.”
I let her pull me to my feet and start toward the kitchen. Ryan rose as if to follow, but my mother put a hand to stop him. He nodded to her and took his seat.
In the kitchen, my mother made us decaf tea, reminding me that I couldn’t have anything stronger because of the baby. She said the word like a prayer. I had a feeling she would take every opportunity to remind me, herself, and everyone else that I was pregnant. I had a long seven months ahead of me, or did I?
“Mom, what do I need to expect out of this pregnancy?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, laying a cool cloth on the back of my neck.
“I mean with Ryan being a shifter and all, will she grow faster, bigger, do tricks, what?”
Mom laughed heartily, then said, “Nothing like that. Shifters are basically humans who can turn into animals. We aren’t animals. Everything will be normal about the pregnancy. You might gain a little more weight since the baby has a higher metabolism even now, than you do, but that’s all.
“Speaking of, let me check your neck wound then get everyone in here to help me get a midnight snack ready. You need to get to bed soon.”
“What about interrogating Sophia?”
“Your dad, Mr. Sullivan, and Dave can do it.”
“But I want to hear what she has to say,” I whined, forgetting that I was now an adult when she used her commanding voice.
Mom rolled her eyes and told me to tilt my head back. “I guess with all the times you passed out, you probably aren’t tired.” I could hear her laughing at me behind those words. I was tired from everything that had happened today, and she knew it.
The tape pulled at my hair when she removed it, and my yelp of pain brought Ryan into the kitchen, followed quickly by my father and sister. Everyone else took their time.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” my mother said, looking at my neck.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked, looking down at the bloody gauze she had in her hand with fear that the wound was infected. I didn’t smell an infection. I didn’t even smell blood, thank God.
“There’s nothing there,” she said, stepping aside so that Ryan could look.
“Mr. Sullivan, is the Angel powerful enough to heal a wound completely?” Ryan asked, looking from me to Daniel and Devan.
“Yes, but she didn’t have time. We were too busy worrying about catching Sophia and Shawna. She did enough to stop the bleeding before taking off after the vampire. When it comes to her, I don’t ask many questions. I get what I can and be thankful God is allowing her to intervene the way she does. Why?” he asked, coming into the kitchen to stand beside Ryan.
“Huh?” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Ryan asked
“I’m not sure anything is. Abby developed some of Dimitri’s powers but not all of them, and they aren’t as strong as his. She is healing quicker than Abby did, I believe,” he said, looking at me oddly. “Perhaps she has some shifter blood in her somewhere. Sam, what do you think?”
Sam approached me, mumbled a few words, and looked into my eyes. After a long minute she said, “She has some supernatural blood in her, but it is faint. I don’t know what it is. My guess is that between her ancestral blood, your shifter mother breastfeeding you, and being mated by one has upped her supernatural abilities. As you said earlier, Mr. Alexander, the Fates make up and change the rules as they go along. We can ask Serena if you like later, but my guess is that she will say the same. I would be thankful for it, especially with the pregnancy. I don’t see anything else that would cause it.”
Sighing heavily, I leapt off the counter and let Ryan wrap me in his arms. I was hungry, tired, and ready for bed.
Chapter 22 ~ The Interrogation
~~~Ryan~~~
Sophia was determined not to speak to us, and we were too exhausted to make her that night, so after about a half an hour of getting nowhere, we went to bed. Leigh and I had felt bad when we first realized that we didn’t
have enough beds for everyone, but the Sullivans fixed that problem for us quickly.
“We’re sorry they aren’t real beds,” Devan said, handing Dave an air mattress, “but these are easy to carry with us when having to shift from one place to another.”
Leigh had been amazed by this ability and a bit saddened that my family couldn’t do magic, and therefore, she wouldn’t gain the ability as Abby had. Devan reassured her that Abby couldn’t do it all of the time. He said her emotions had to be running high for her to successfully shift.
After everything that had happened that night, I was grateful to finally crawl into bed with Leigh. I had nearly lost her and had found out I was going to be a father all in about an hour’s time. I couldn’t stop touching her stomach. I knew she was my mate and hoped she could have my children, but I had it in my head that if she could it wouldn’t happen for a few years. With all the unprotected sex we’d been having, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, but every time I took her, I was so caught up in the need that I hadn’t thought about it, and she hadn’t said anything.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, once we had settled for the night.
“Why are you sorry?” I asked. Nothing that had happened that night was her fault.
“With all that has been going on these past few weeks, I forgot to refill my pills. I took the last one the morning of the fire. I called in the refill but forgot all about going to pick them up. I was so bad about taking them before you came into my life that the habit never stuck. I did this to you. I didn’t mean to. Please don’t be mad.”
She started to cry again, so I pulled her up to face me and kissed her to silence her sobs. Once she was quiet, I asked, “Have I said or done anything to make you think I was mad about this?”
“No, but…”
“Leigh, baby, I could never be angry about you carrying my child. Yeah, I wished we had gotten a chance to be us for a while, but I’ll never regret this baby or any other child of mine you have.”
“I love you,” she said and kissed me and undressed me and rode me until I was having a hard time keeping myself from digging my nails into her hips and howling her name. She bit down on my shoulder to keep from screaming my name when she came, and for the first time in my life, I cursed my healing abilities because I would have loved to see the indentions of her teeth from where she claimed me by marking my skin the next morning. I didn’t need a mark, though. Anyone who came near us the next morning with their senses on full alert could smell the sex on us. For that matter, they probably heard us.
Despite how late we stayed up the night before, we woke early the next morning to the smell of food. Katelyn and a few other members of the Sullivan pack were already in the kitchen, cooking and conjuring up food for us all when we wandered downstairs.
An hour later, Sophia’s fear of having so many supernaturals surrounding her was palpable. I asked questions, Daniel asked questions, Mr. Alexander asked questions, and all three men she ignored. Eventually, Dave asked to have a turn with her. He shooed everyone out of the room. We would all be able to hear what was going on from the hall and living room, but our lack of presence seemed to ease the captive woman a bit.
Dave spun a chair around, sat it directly in front of Sophia, and took a seat. He stared at her for a long time. I watched it all from the hall, mesmerized by how authoritative his posture and demeanor was. He was definitely giving off an alpha vibe that made me want to obey.
“Sophia, look at me,” he said. She resisted for a bit, but eventually, her body, against her will, did as he ordered her to do.
“Good girl. Now I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and I want you to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?”
“You’re going to kill me if I do,” she said. Her posture was stiff and defiant, but her voice shook.
“Maybe. But I’ll definitely kill you if you don’t. See, right now I see you as a threat to my best friend, my sister-in-law, and my future niece or nephew. And I feel the need to eliminate all threats to my family. Your silence isn’t doing anything to sway me to let you live. If you explain yourself, tell me who’s helping you, what all you’ve done, why you’ve done it, and promise to leave me and mine alone, I might be persuaded to let you live, and if I let you live, I’ll give you your ability to shift back.” I figured that shortly after we caught her, Sam had cast a spell on her to keep her from shifting and getting free of her binds when she never escaped. More and more, I was finding the benefits of joining Daniel’s pack appealing. Pine Hollow has very little to do with anyone who isn’t a shapeshifter, but I’m beginning to see the advantage in working with other species.
“You promise to let me live?” she asked, looking from the hall where I stood inside the doorway to the kitchen to Dave.
“I didn’t say that. I said I might let you live. You have to be straight with me. If I think you’re lying about anything I’m going to take off your head.” He emphasized his point by letting his right hand turn into a large panther paw with long, sharp claws. He ran one of those nails lightly across her throat for effect.
She gulped and nodded. “I’ll tell you. I promise, I’ll tell you everything. It wasn’t all my idea,” she said, looking to me pleadingly.
“What wasn’t your idea?” Dave asked, never taking his eyes off her. I had a thought that if he did she would go back to refusing to speak to us. Even though she would occasionally look away from him, she didn’t look away long. His eyes, his words, his presence kept pulling her back and making her talk.
“Killing Leigh. I mean after seeing the two of them together at the wedding and seeing the way Ryan had treated me in front of the hotel after I told him we were engaged and his subsequent leaving of the pack—which I still hate all of you for voting in favor of—yeah, I wanted to kill him, both of them, but not literally. I was angry, hurt, embarrassed, and I wanted her out of the way, but I knew I could never actually do it, not on my own.”
I hadn’t known until recently that to save face the Council had set up a mock vote to vote me out of the pack. I had been long gone, and Mr. Alexander had assumed I had known, but I hadn’t.
“So if you knew you couldn’t do it, whose idea was it, and are they the ones who provided you with help?”
She sat silent for a while. Occasionally, she would open and close her mouth, but nothing came out.
“You will tell me, Sophia, or I’ll…” he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t have to. His claws were out again.
“It was the Council, okay. Every one of them showed up at my house the day the pack voted to let Ryan leave.”
“I said not to lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Leigh has been having trouble from the moment she left the hotel the day after the wedding.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that. I think the Council hired someone else at first to harass her. They didn’t approach me until later…after Ryan left. I guess the Council didn’t take Ryan and Leigh’s relationship seriously until he did that. To make sure that no one else up and left, they held the mock vote. I know he thought he left on his own with Mr. Alexander’s help, and I guess in a way he did, but only the Council and a few others voted to keep him. The majority voted to let him go. No one but the Council saw him as important, so they figured if he wanted to go then let him. But the Council couldn’t allow him to walk away like that. They wanted him back or gone.”
“Why does the Council think he’s important?” Dave asked, taking the words right out of my mouth.
“He isn’t, not really. He’s your best friend. You two are like brothers, and they knew if he went, you’d eventually go, especially if the reason he left was to be with Leigh, your wife’s sister. The two of you worry them. They’re afraid that you will assert your power over the pack.”
“If they are afraid of that, why not let us all go?” Dave asked, sounding unsure about what he was hearing.
“Because they think they can control you bet
ter here. If you leave the pack, you can build an army and take over the town, or even if you don’t, they fear that if you start your own pack somewhere else, most of our people might join you.”
“So Leigh and Ryan have gone through all of this because of me?” Dave sounded more than a little weary and disgusted with the entire situation.
“Mostly yes, but not completely. I wanted Ryan. I’ve wanted him since we were preteens. I know most people don’t believe that. They think I only wanted him because I couldn’t have you or your brothers. But he’s always been nice to me. When my parents came to me and told me that they had arranged our marriage, I was elated. I thought they understood how much I loved him, but I think they just wanted me close to Danielle which they knew I would be if Ryan and I married.”
“My parents only wanted your family’s clout and money,” I said, speaking up for the first time.
“I know,” Sophia said. “They knew that, which is why they agreed.”
“Your refusal to take me hurt me to my soul and pissed my parents off something fierce, so when the Council came and asked for our help, we readily gave it. They wanted us to simply make your life in Washington miserable and to, at the very least, delay your meeting Leigh. I was overseas, as you know, which was perfect for them because no one would suspect my family and me, considering we would be your first suspects, but I was only in New Zealand for a short time before I flew to Seattle.
“The witch—I don’t know her name. She wouldn’t tell me—was already there, wreaking havoc on Leigh’s life, so the Council sent Jacob on to Washington to start on you.”
“Why this witch and Jacob? How do they play into things?”
“I don’t know. I think the Council has a few people like them…guns for hire, I guess. They were both very proficient. What happened with Jacob was a fluke.”
“I’m still not getting the overall purpose,” I said.
“The plan was to keep you both distracted and away from each other for as long as possible in the hopes that you would give up on each other. When the two of you moved in together, they changed tactics. They told us what to do and when to do it, but then Jacob died and everything went wrong, and you guys came back here, and Dave and Danielle started staying away from pack territory. The Council called me back—I had gone back to New Zealand after Jacob died—and told me to get rid of Leigh. I begged them to make the witch do it, but she disappeared after the fire. They promised me that once Leigh was gone everyone would come back to the pack where they could control you all. They promised me that, one way or another, I’d get to marry Ryan. They don’t know Leigh’s pregnant. I guess things will get worse when they find that out.”
Outcast (Supernaturals Book 2) Page 18